For default airports will all the gates have animated SODE jetways or just the user's gate? The reason that I ask is I'm wondering how AI aircraft will work with the new GSX 2.
I was quite sure this question would come up soon. We thought a lot about it, and we decided that, at least for the initial release, it will work only for the user airplane.
The obvious reason is performances.
By supporting only the user gate, we can afford the luxury of having *much* better looking jetways than the default ones without any significant fps impact, since the static ones won't have any bones/skin, they are a static object and are all carefully optimized with multiple LODs. Note that, a *docked* jetway, even if it's not moving, is still a skinned dynamic object, since its docked position cannot be pre-made as a static object, being dependent on the airplane door and its parked position.
Supporting AI too, would multiply the number of bones and animation running at the same time, and it's not even something we can fully control, since it's difficult to anticipate how many of them will have to move at the same time, due to very different AI density, schedules, etc.
With some AI products, such as UT Live, we cannot even know when the airplane will depart exactly, since their schedules are not standard and there's no support to read them programmatically, so we cannot even know when it's time to dock/undock a jetway with such products.
In fact, almost every 3rd party AI traffic product has the ability to *exclude* jetway animations from their model as a feature. Because, of course, even if it sounds nice in principle, most users realize their precious hardware power is better spent for other things.
So, at least for the initial release, we'll stick to the user gate only.
